Various distributed processing platforms provide a plurality of processing devices which can perform a distributed task in parallel batches or portions. Examples of distributed processing platforms include the Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, cloud service platforms, or other suitable software service platforms. Distributed processing platforms generally distribute a task across many processing devices that individually do not have a significant amount of processing performance, but are effective when the task is distributed across hundreds or even thousands of the processing devices. However, a number of processors on which a task is to be performed often cannot be determined prior to performing a portion of the task. Additionally, as the number of processing devices is increased, it becomes more difficult to manage the results of the distributed task and determine when the task has been completed. In some scenarios, multiple processing devices finish respective portions of the distributed task at nearly a same time and attempt to write results to generally a same data storage device, which can cause contention issues and delay completion of the task.